Don't Fear the Change

Prisoners face a lot of obstacles when it comes to changing their patterns of criminal thinking. External obstacles include lack of education; lack of access to proper guidance or therapy; lack of funds, employment, or opportunity; and cultural expectations and influences, among others. Internal obstacles include apathy and lack of desire, unresolved anger and childhood trauma, neurologically entrenched addiction issues, and fear of change.

These lists of obstacles are not exhaustive, but they begin to paint a picture of the complexity of changing a criminal's faulty thinking patterns.

For a prisoner to really change he must want it. He must see the banality of his current path, and he must actively seek to change. But with so many obstacles where does one begin?

Fear of change is profound for anyone: the business executive taking a new job in another state; a student heading to college for the first time; the newly single middle-ager; and the criminal changing everything he has known his whole life.

Most criminals have a pattern for facing what they fear: run, or hide behind a false sense of security (guns, gangs, or drugs for instance). Learned patterns of behavior are difficult to change.

Let's be honest: change is difficult for anyone, because change always comes with a chance for failure. Something may go wrong. And the familiar is easier to deal with than taking a chance at something new.

Perhaps that is why Michigan's prison administration and lawmakers are so reluctant to change what is obviously not working in Michigan's prison system. The old patterns of thinking that pushed for longer prison sentences, less education and opportunities in prison and on release, and the militant objections to restorative justice practices have got to change. But change takes courage and those who hold to old-school ideas of criminal justice are no different than the criminal who lets fear keep him from changing.

Albert Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is insanity. So, if the criminal wants something different from his chaotic life he must be willing to change his thinking and behavior; and if Michigan wants less crime, fewer repeat offenders, and healing for crime victims it must be willing to change the policies that have failed the public, the victims of crimes, and the prisoners for whom it is responsible.